leylined | (no subject)

The sun was out and unseasonably warm in the afternoon sky. Adam sat in the driver's seat of his Honda, quiet as the grave. He'd just driven through the poorer side of Henrietta and down an old and familiar dirt track. To his left stood a bank of familiar rusted mailboxes. He hadn't been here since the summer, yet it felt like it was yesterday that he and Ronan had left here with his meager belongings, his left ear roaring and his very soul feeling like it'd been ripped asunder.

The trailer park sat unchanged, a collection of the lowest rung of the financially insecure in the small town. He'd done so much, made more progress than he'd ever hoped to, and still there was the feeling like he'd never amount to more than this place. Yet still he couldn't go in, crippled by fear. Fear of his father. Fear that he wouldn't be able to leave once he went in. Most of all, though, fear that he would finally be as hated by his mother as much as his father feared him. He'd taken off his Aglionby sweater, chosen not to drive the Bentley, and made sure anything of his he'd gotten since leaving this place, anything of value greater than this place, was unseen. His hands ached in the cold and he had to fight the urge to lick them as they started to chap.

He almost forgot about his father's lack of a job before the man himself drove by in his old pickup, passing him with a few of his buddies in tow, no doubt trying to find a bar to crawl into and not come out of until the next day, stinking drunk and angrier than a starved lion. Fear kept him glued in his seat, watching with wide eyes as the man turned right next to him.

And kept driving.

This was a bad idea. He knew it now, even while he knew this was the last time Robert would be home for the rest of the weekend, if his mother was lucky. The wrapped present for her stood sentinel in the back seat as he contemplated whether he should go on or not.

Threaded | Flat

Ronan trusts very few people. At the top of his list of people not to trust Robert Parrish sits. Holding the present in his arms with that look on his face it didn't take much to figure out that something was going on. It took even less effort to bully his way into the passengers seat of the Honda.

Ronan Lynch didn't accept the word no for an answer on a good day. Today there was a snowballs chance in hell he would back down and let Adam go alone.

Sitting in the passengers seat he stares at the mobile home. Not even hearing the rattle of the old pickup trucks exhaust gets his attention. He knows who it is.

"What did you get her?" He asks, still watching the tin can house with venom in his eyes. Ronan hoped Parrish had bought her a clue or some common sense, for once he bit his tongue and kept his words to himself.